The Extended Mind

4. Defending the Bounds of Cognition

Introduction Question: Why did the pencil think that 2 + 2 = 4? Clark’s answer: Because it was coupled to the mathematician. That about sums up what is wrong with Clark’s extended mind hypothesis . Clark apparently thinks that the nature of the processes internal to a pencil, Rolodex, computer, cell phone, piece of string, or whatever, has nothing to do with whether that thing carries out cognitive processing.1 Rather, what matters is how the thing interacts with a cognitive agent; the thing has to be coupled to a cognitive agent in a particular kind of way. Clark (this volume) gives three conditions that constitute a rough or partial specification of the kind of coupling required: 1. The resource has to be reliably available and typically invoked. 2. Any information retrieved from/with the resource must be more or less automatically endorsed. It should not usually be subject to critical scrutiny (unlike the opinions of other people, for example). It should be deemed about as trustworthy as something retrieved clearly from biological memory. 3. Information contained in the resource should be easily accessible as and when required (Clark, this volume, p. 46). Granted condition 3 doesn’t fit the use of a pencil very well, since the mathematician is not really extracting information from the pencil, but blame Clark for that. After all, he likes the idea that the use of pencil and paper in computing sums constitutes part of an agent’s cognitive processing ; hence it’s up to him to make his story work there.2 When Clark makes an object cognitive when it is connected to a cognitive agent, he is committing an instance of a coupling-constitution fallacy. 4 Defending the Bounds of Cognition Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa 68 F. Adams, K. Aizawa This is the most common mistake that extended mind theorists make.3 The fallacious pattern is to draw attention to cases, real or imagined, in which some object or process is coupled in some fashion to some cognitive agent. From this, one slides to the conclusion that the object or process constitutes part of the agent’s cognitive apparatus or cognitive processing. If you are coupled to your pocket notebook in the sense of always having it readily available, use it a lot, trust it implicitly, and so forth, then Clark infers that the pocket notebook constitutes a part of your memory store. If you are coupled to a rock in the sense of always having it readily available, use it a lot, trust it implicitly, and so forth, Clark infers that the rock constitutes a part of your memory store. Yet coupling relations are distinct from constitutive relations, and the fact that object or process X is coupled to object or process Y does not entail that X is part of Y. The neurons leading into a neuromuscular junction are coupled to the muscles they innervate , but the neurons are not a part of the muscles they innervate. The release of neurotransmitters at the neuromuscular junction is coupled to the process of muscular contraction, but the process of releasing neurotransmitters at the neuromuscular junction is not part of the process of muscular contraction. (That’s a quick and dirty run through the couplingconstitution fallacy. For a less quick and dirty treatment, see Adams and Aizawa 2008.) So, if the fact that an object or process X is coupled to a cognitive agent does not entail that X is a part of the cognitive agent’s cognitive apparatus, what does? The nature of X, of course. One needs a theory of what makes a process a cognitive process rather than a noncognitive process. One needs a theory of the “mark of the cognitive.” It won’t do simply to say that a cognitive process is one that is coupled to a cognitive agent, since this only pushes back the question. One still needs a theory of what makes something a cognitive agent. This is another weakness of extended mind theories. Yet, in all fairness to Clark and other extended mind theorists, it must be admitted that one of the shortcomings of contemporary cognitive psychology is that there is no well-established theory of just exactly what constitutes the cognitive. Be this as it may, Adams and Aizawa (2001) set out a rather familiar proposal, namely, that cognition is constituted by certain sorts of causal processes that involve nonderived content. We motivated this proposal in two ways, by appeal to examples in...